The Escape from "Pigpen" --
Hijacking an Art Form
Ken Burns' Jazz

New York City: The tony lobby of Avery Fisher Hall, a prime venue in Lincoln
Center for the Performing Arts, was alive with pre-concert buzz. It was a
gala, a benefit titled "Swing That Music," presented by Jazz at Lincoln
Center -- a/k/a J@LC -- to be followed by a dinner at the New York State
Theater Promenade for "$1,000 and up" donors. The event was sponsored by AOL
and Time Warner.

Honorary Gala Chair was Sidney Poitier, MC and Board Member Ed
Bradley the CBS News correspondent would present awards to the
philanthropists Jack and Susan Rudin "for leadership," the saxophonist
Illinois Jacquet "for artistic excellence" and others. Featured performers
would be Jacquet, the New Orleans entertainer known as Dr. John, Jessye
Norman the opera singer was to sing "Nobody Knows The Trouble I've Seen" and
Broadway star Andre deShields would sing songs associated with Louis
Armstrong. All of them would be accompanied by Wynton Marsalis leading his
Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra. The expectant audience milling in the lobby
was multi-racial; well dressed, coiffed and heeled; faces expressing the
pleasure of privilege.

While off to one side, the documentary filmmaker Ken Burns, whose
ten-episode, 19 hour documentary "Jazz" is scheduled to be aired on the
Public Broadcasting System in January, was being interviewed. General Motors
has announced an "integrated marketing plan" to support his documentary,
while Starbucks, Sony Music, Verve, and Knopf "unveil steps to drive tune in"
for the series.

Burns talks well and fast with unblinking eye-contact and, like any
good politician, has the discipline to stay on-message, does not mind
repeating himself and is not too shy to blow his own horn. In answer to a
question about how all of this can exist alongside a system where the
majority of even the good players perform for something like 75% of a meager
door, he said: "The jazz community reminds me of Pigpen in Peanuts.
Always surrounded by a cloud of dust. It's always been that way. Sure. You
bet. But I completely disagree that it has to be that way.

"Jazz" is part three of "an American trilogy," the first two being
"The Civil War" and "Baseball." "When I did the Civil War," Burns said, "I
wasn't interested in who won this or that battle. Before I made my Civil War
film, there were about five book stores that had Civil War sections and
afterwards there were maybe five that didn't. Before, people told me 'I'm not
into military history' and I'd say 'This film is for you,' like now people
say 'I'm not really into jazz' and I say 'I made this film for you.'

"But I don't see it as just about jazz. I see it about race, about two World
Wars, about the Depression; it tells me about sex, about drugs, about cities,
it tells me about my country.

"We are a country that is based upon the revolutionary idea that
all men are created equal. The man who wrote that owned 200 human beings and
never considered freeing them. And these unfree people who lived in a 'free'
country, this African-American community gave birth to this music and shared
it with everybody. They didn't claim it for themselves. I hope that after
this, more people than ever will go to clubs and buy records.

"That's why I forged this alliance between two big record companies
that normally don't get along. To publish a single box with five CDs, a sort
of best of with 22 of the most important jazz artists. The first truly 'best
of.' Normally you just get the best of one label. This is the best of the
entire history of jazz. I used the power of Verve/Universal and Columbia/Sony
to get other labels to come along. So anybody can now go and get a hugely
great jazz collection. Budget price. Budget price. They can begin
their jazz collection with this five-CD set that represents the series -- 94
songs out of the 497 that are in the films."

The box, in stores this month, is called "Ken Burns Jazz - The Story
of America's Music. There is also a sort of best-of best-of single CD
called The Best Of Ken Burns Jazz on the promotional copy of which it
is written: "It's the Jazz Event Of The Year! . . . Ken Burns
personally produced this special 20-song advance CD, featuring music from
his upcoming PBS Special, Jazz . . . The Jazz
releases will be supported by a massive promotion and publicity campaign,
with billions of impressions - everyone will be talking about Jazz."

I am not making any of this up. It's "hugely great." This is
"massive." There will be "billions of impressions." Jazz will
now apparently forever be capitalized or italicized or both and prefaced by "
Ken Burns." With the help of Wynton Marsalis, who Burns calls "really the
star of the film," Burns and General Motors seem to have hijacked an entire
art form. According to a press release, there is also a "GM Education Program
To Reach Six Million Students Nationwide Jazz College Fund."

"I've been working day and night for six years," Burns said. "Choosing
the footage, the still photographs, newsreel footage, educational stuff. GM
has spent a huge amount of money trying to get to school kids through music
teachers associations. This is the golden opportunity to see what we can do
to renew our music. Our art. The only art form Americans have invented."

Mike Zwerin is the longtime jazz correspondent for the International Herald
Tribune, and author of Swing Under The Nazis, Cooper Square Press.

2/9/01 -- After having read your commentary, I now understand why there are such huge gaping holes in the documentary. It ought to be called "Ken Burns' Jazz Tribute to Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong" since they dominate more than 50 percent of the film.

I heard Mr. Burns defend his film in a taped forum held at Chicago's illustrious Harold Washington Library. He said his purpose in making the filmt trying to document jazz's evolution in America [huh?] but to stimulate interest in an art form known to be poorly supported by the masses.

I guess it would take a "knowledgeable" jazz lover and film maker, the likes Clint Eastwood, Gordon Parks or possibly Quincy Jones, to make the jazz film I would want to see.